There's no way around it: The MyTouch 4G Slide is a brick. While it's similar in size to many other smartphones (4.8 by 2.4 by .52 inchesHWD), at 6.5 ounces, it's unusually heavy. But it feels well-built from good materials; the front is black glass with physical action buttons and a little optical touchpad below the 3.7-inch, 800-by-480 screen. On the soft-touch black back, an 8-megapixel camera with a dual LED flash sticks out slightly, highlighted by a grooved silver plastic strip.

Slide the phone open to expose the large four-row keyboard, with shallow but well-separated keys. The keys are a little mushier than those on the HTC Status ($49.99, 3 stars) or the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G ($129.99, 4 stars), but they'll more than do. All in all, this is a good keyboard.

In my tests, the 4G Slide got acceptable reception, and phone call quality was decent. It was a little harsh at high volumes, a bit too trebly at times, but utterly adequate. In any case, this isn't a phone you're buying for nonstop calling. Built-in noise cancellation blocks some background noise at the cost of making your voice sound compressed when it's working hard. The speakerphone is nice and loud, usable indoors and out, and transmissions through the speakerphone had a slight echo, but were clear. Talk time, at 5 hours 22 minutes, was fine.

T-Mobile's Genius Button enhances traditional voice dialing with network-based software that lets you run Web searches and dictate text messages by voice. While the voice dialing worked fine over my Plantronics Voyager Pro+ headset (4 stars, $99), I couldn't get it to connect to the network service to dictate text messages; the phone repeatedly timed out.

The 4G Slide's HSPA+ 21 modem, combined with its fast processor, makes for blazing Internet speeds. During tests, I got more than 5Mbps down with Ookla's Speedtest.net app. The phone also offers 802.11 b/g/n connectivity, and leverages that for Wi-Fi calling. Call quality over Wi-Fi isn't as good as cellular; I heard a noticeable background hiss, and voices sounded computerized at times. But it's a terrific backup for when you have no signal, and the feature isn't offered by any other carrier. The 4G slide also works as a tethered modem or a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to 5 devices, with the right T-Mobile service plan.

Android and App Performance
The 4G Slide runs Android 2.3.4 with HTC's Sense 3.0 extensions, on a Qualcomm dual-core, 1.2GHz processor. This is roughly the same platform as in our other T-Mobile Editor's Choice, the HTC Sensation 4G ($199.99, 4 stars), and it offers similarly excellent performance. The 4G Slide did very well on our benchmarks, and Web pages, including Flash content, loaded quickly.

HTC's Sense is the best of the manufacturer Android skins, perfectly balancing extra features such as Facebook and Twitter integration in the contact book with a relatively non-bothersome visual identity. I didn't experience any slowdowns or stalls on my test phone during the review period.

T-Mobile has added several apps. KidZone creates a custom, locked screen with only certain applications on it, so your children have limited access to your phone. T-Mobile TV offers streaming television channels for $12.99 per month; TeleNav gives you GPS with live traffic, and Qik gives you video chat, that, well, doesn't work very well.

Multimedia
T-Mobile makes big promises for the 4G Slide's camera, calling it the "most advanced camera of any smartphone." It's an excellent camera, but some of the company's heavily touted features deserve an asterisk.

Let's start with the good news: When you hit the dedicated camera button, you'll get sharp 8-megapixel photos and clear, smooth 1080p high-def video at 24 frames per second. The video gets wobbly; it could use some image stabilization. But HTC has worked out the kinks that caused hiccups on our HTC Sensation phone. Still photos captured on the phone are as clear as any camera phone I've ever seen, and low-light photos are sharp, with no shutter-speed blur. There's also a VGA front-facing camera for self shots.

T-Mobile advertises "zero shutter lag," but the autofocus still takes about 0.6 seconds. You can take shots before the autofocus locks in, but they may be blurry. Once the autofocus has locked, shots are pretty much instantaneous. "ClearShot HDR" takes several photographs and combines them to prevent bright areas from washing out. But if subjects are moving, you'll get a weird ghosting effect. The phone also has a burst mode and panorama mode, which work as advertised.

This is a stellar media playback phone, as well. The phone has about 880MB of free memory, but it also comes with an 8GB MicroSD card under the back cover; our 32GB card worked fine.

The 4G Slide plays all the usual music formats through its 3.5mm headset jack, through its tinny speakers or over a Bluetooth headset. For video, it handled my 1080p HD-quality H.264 files without a problem. T-Mobile's streaming TV service is expensive at $12.99 per month, but it offers a wide range of live channels that play smoothly in full screen. I'd subscribe to Netflix instead, which comes preloaded on the phone and also had no problem with clear, full-screen video over a T-Mobile 4G connection in my tests. There's only one missing piece: no way to connect an HDMI cable to view the content of your phone on your HDTV. T-Mobile promotes wireless DLNA streaming to get video onto TVs, but the TV side of that equation is often totally unusable. The phone also has an FM radio, which works when you have headphones plugged in.

Conclusions
The T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide takes most of the things we liked from the HTC Sensation and throws in a faster Internet connection and a hardware keyboard. Yes, it's a brick, but we like power, speed, and flexibility, and we're willing to weigh down our pockets for them.

Our previous Editor's Choice for keyboarded smartphones on T-Mobile was the T-Mobile G2 (4 stars, $99), which is slimmer and lighter, but slower and less powerful all around. We also quite like the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G, but the Sidekick's youth-oriented Android skin can be very divisive. The MyTouch 4G Slide is state-of-the-art Android , and T-Mobile customers looking for a true pocket computer should pick one up immediately.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts...

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